Dimensions / 40.2×30.4cm
Medium / Black & white photograph on baryta paper

Taken by Manfred Montwé, this is a photograph of Chronicle of a Beautiful Paintress, one of the works featured in Nam June Paik’s first solo show Exposition of Music – Electronic Television held in Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal in March 1963. Paik wrote a few scores for Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, and one of them, Chronicle of a Beautiful Paintress, instructs her to dye different national flags with her menstrual blood each month, the American flag in January, Burmese in February, Chinese in March, Ethiopian in April, French in May, German in June, Hungarian in July, Irish in August, Jamaican in September, Congolese in October, Mongolian in November, Russian in December; and to display them in the gallery context. Knowles actualized this score and provided the four national flags for Exposition of Music. On both sides of the frame that showed an article about the Cuban missile crisis on a German newspaper in 1961, were four stained flags of Germany, Turkey, the UK and Denmark she provided.